Hitting 2 pair in poker, especially on the flop is when players start to get pretty excited about the putting money into the pot. When you think about how uncommon it is to make two pairs you can start to see why! By the flop a random 2 card hand will only make 2 pair one in every 50 times, and even when you increase that all the way to the river and all the cards have been seen this still only happens once every 20 or so times! The fact that with 2 pair you are also now beating the hand that everyone wants to see : pocket Aces you are now in a territory to take a lot of chips off your opponent! There are lots of different combinations of 2 pairs, and newer players may not understand what beats what, for example does a pair of Kings with a pair of 2’s beat a pair of Queens with a pair of Jacks? The short answer is yes and we’ll explain why now.
The way to determine who has the winning two pair hand is simply who has the largest of all the pairs. So in the question we posed a second ago the pair of kings was the highest pair out or all the pairs there so that 2 pair hand wins the showdown. If there are two players with the same top pair then it comes down to who has the largest second pair to determine the winner. This would mean that a player with K9 would beat a player with K8 on a K 9 8 2 3 board as both players will have the top pair with a pair of kings however the King with the 9 makes the second biggest pair and so wins the pot! Finally, if Both players have the same two pairs then whoever has the highest 5th card will take the pot. An example of this would be if one player hand K8 and another had 98 and the board was 8 5 5 2 3, both players will have two pairs, 8’s and 5’s however the K8 hand would also use the King as its 5th card which is higher than the 9 and therefore would win the hand.
The final point that should be made about 2 pair hands is is when your pair gets forfeited. By this we mean if you had two pair, but a larger pair hits the board making one of your pairs irrelevant. Take the example of a K K 7 7 5 board. A player who was holding a pair of 3’s would have two pair on the flop and would be ahead of a hand such as A9 who only had a pair of Kings. However on the turn when the 7 comes the top two pairs for both players are now the King’s and 7’s which means the pair of 3’s won’t be used anymore. This in turn means that the A9 hand is now ahead as the Ace would be used as the 5th card while the pair of 3’s would now be using the 5 as the 5th card. This is perhaps intuitive but it’s always best to remember that you don’t get anything in poker for 3 pairs!
